The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Ashley Christensen

When Ashley Christensen was tasked with cooking a lunch for attendees at the Southern Food Alliance Symposium last October, she didn’t parade out the platters of barbecued pork and fixins that everyone expected. Instead, she prepared an all-vegetarian feast, complete with dishes like smoked tomato pie with whipped corn cream, and crispy okra dressed with benne-tahini dressing (the meal garnered a standing ovation).

It’s not that Christensen is on any sort of anti-meat crusade—on the contrary, she’s got one entire restaurant that’s an homage to her mom’s fried chicken—nor that she doesn’t enjoy some good BBQ (she’s on an all-star ‘cue team made up of some of the best pit masters in America). However, the Raleigh, NC-based chef has a knack for defying expectations, and as such she’s redefining what it means to pay tribute to ancestral cuisine below the Mason Dixon. “Comfort food is not fried food,” she says. “It is something that is connected to your soul. It is part of tradition, and history, and where a person is from.”

Being unafraid to ruffle the feathers with her own riffs on down-home classics has paid off, helping Christensen establish herself as a leading voice among the South’s new wave of chefs. It has also injected a burst of energy into the food scene of Raleigh, NC, where she runs a burgeoning mini empire which already includes the acclaimed Poole’s Diner (for which she is a James Beard semifinalist this year for Best Chef: Southeast), Beasley’s Chicken + Honey, Chuck’s, and subterranean cocktail den Fox Liquor Bar.

Like many southern chefs, Christensen draws inspiration from mom’s cooking during her childhood in Kernersville, NC, but her narrative is distinct from the yarn you’ve heard so many times before. Her mother—a child of the Air Force—traveled extensively between Tennessee and Japan, eating authentic cuisines of various cultures wherever she went, while her father toured the South as a truck driver and brought back tales (and tastes) of the food traditions of local communities along his routes. “I think my mom had a really refreshing take on what Southern food is because she grew up a Southerner and then had all these really amazing and inspiring environments. She took all that and returned with a new sensibility about what is home,” says Christensen.

Christensen is also a chef highly influenced and inspired by her peers, whom she has been able to connect with through her tireless activism within the Southern food scene. Her skills and creativity have been multiplied through her involvement in cooking think-tanks made up of other regional heavyweights including Sean Brock (Husk), Rodney Scott (Scott’s BBQ), Donald Link (Cochon), and fellow Beard-nominee Andrea Reusing (chef-owner at Lantern), whom she studied under. Her food has often been described as Southern with French inspirations, though Christensen’s own explanation seems more rooted in what food means rather than the labels: “The thing that we do as Southerners is—when people die, when we’re celebrating, when someone’s promoted, when there’s a birthday—we cook. No matter what it is, you deal with it by cooking. You deal with it by gathering around a meal.”

From a simple plate of backyard tomatoes with salt to baby eels sautéed over charcoal in Basque Country, Christensen’s defining food memories are a whirlwind of people, flavors, and techniques that all reflect her commitment to embracing outside influences while remaining true to her surroundings. Here, she takes us from Bloody Mary-fueled parties at John Currence’s house in Mississippi to crawfish boils in Memphis as she breaks down the 10 dishes that have defined her career so far.

This meal blew me away, and to some degree it informs a piece of our next restaurant concept. The baby eels are seasonal and happened to be in during our visit. They have a silvery, smokey crunch, and a sweetness that can only be attributed to youth. Like most things at Asador Etxebarri, they are shaken over the chef's homemade charcoal in a custom-made, perforated sauté pan, barely singeing them with equal parts smoke and heat. Towards the end of our meal, I received a text from Mike Lata of FIG in Charleston stating, "If you don't order the smoked goat butter, I'll never forgive you." He was right—it would have been an unforgivable offense.

2. Mom's Fried Chicken

My Memphis-born mother's fried chicken is of my most texturally vivid food memories. From start to finish, the smells, sights, and sounds of the whole process are ingrained in me. She would soak the chicken in buttermilk and then shake it in seasoned flour dredge in one of the week’s brown paper shopping bags (the original recycling plan). Next would come the crackling of hot oil tested with drip water, and then the gentle sizzling of the battered chicken slowly rested into the oil by my mother's deft hand. Then the silencing of the oil by the removal of the crispy-skinned chicken and the promise that the dinner bell was soon to ring (if the smell of browning chicken skin hadn't already given that away). As my father was a hobbyist bee keeper, wild-flower honey was always the condiment of choice. This near-weekly childhood experience made such an impression on me that a year and change ago, I opened Beasley's Chicken + Honey in downtown Raleigh.

3. Tandy Wilson's Octopus at City House (Nashville, TN)

Tandy Wilson of City House in Nashville is a close friend, and one of the chefs that I hold in the highest of respect. I’ve been cooking with him for a while, and he only allows himself to import a minimal amount of ingredients to make true Italian food, while most are from the South. For reasons that are likely born close to home, food from the people we love tends to taste a little sweeter. He makes the best octopus I have ever had. If Tandy Wilson shot me in my good hand, I'd still be completely in love with this dish. Once I inquired of the makings of the dish while standing in Tandy's open kitchen, and he said, "It cooks in water that's salty like the sea with some aromatics—and we throw in a wine cork. It's said that the cork makes the octopus more tender, but we do it out of respect for the romance of tradition." I love the "romance" of the cork. I think that these small markers of tradition, and the conversations that they spark, are a part of preserving and celebrating the history of our food, and this is such an important part of defining the future of our food culture.

4. Red beans and rice in the home of City Grocery's John Currence (Oxford, MS)

The Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium in Oxford, MS is an event that truly defined my connection to my South. I had previously thought of the definitive South as a history that simply belonged to those who came before me—those who were a part of it. This event taught me that the South is defined by the friendships that spread throughout the area and all of the knowledge that we can share with each other. In a nutshell, we are a group of people focused on making each other better. Sharing is a given, and there are no secrets among this group of Southern chefs and food folk. Symposium is the culmination of all of this good energy. It is a weekend packed with food, libations, storytelling, and story-making. By Sunday afternoon, participants and presenters are spent. Enter one of my favorite meals of the year.
The first person that I met at my first SFA Symposium was Chef John "Johnny Snack" Currence, the mayor of Oxford's restaurant culture. He welcomed me to the event and made me feel at home all weekend. At the close of the weekend he invited me and others to his home to catch our breath and share an afternoon. This has since become a tradition among close friends and a handful of visitors from afar. Bloody Marys and cold beer-flavored-beer are the drinks of choice, and red beans and rice is the bowl that binds us. It's the ideal comfort dish. It's bittersweet, like the last day of camp, and at the same time, it leaves you already craving next year's helping and all of the camaraderie that comes with it.

5. Boudin at Cochon (New Orleans, LS)

Nobody does boudin like the crew from Donald Link's restaurant team. It's the kind of thing where you think you've had good boudin, and then you have this. It's that "roll your eyes back" kind of good. It's perfectly spicy and crazy-rich with deep livery goodness. I base my recipe on one of Donald's that I found on the Internet years ago. I'm a bit improper in that I case mine by stuffing it into a roasted poblano, served chile relleno style. Mine is pretty damn good, but even that is only barely comparable to the Link version.

6. Billy Link's Crawfish Boil (Memphis, TN)

My dad was a truck driver when I was a kid, and his favorite route was to New Orleans. This influenced his cooking, as well as his occasionally embellished accent, while cooking said cuisine. My brother—being a boy—was allowed to travel in the summers with dad. The fruit of one of these trips was my brother's most prized article of clothing, a mustard-gold t-shirt with a giant red crawfish and red text that read, "First you pinch the tail… then you suck the head."
I was incredibly intrigued by what this process was mapping and why it was legal—parentally speaking—for my brother to be the billboard for such a dirty sounding slogan. Just as it's exciting to whisper swear words when you're a kid, this t-shirt was shiny to me. It left a mark in my memory, one that I would only truly associate with a real food experience many years later.
This past summer, I traveled to Memphis in May with the Fatback Collective, my alleged competitive BBQ pit master team (in truth, we're a bunch of food minds and hands coming together to do good and make each other better). Each day a couple of members team up and make the day or night's meal. The meal that made me feel the luckiest to have been born was the one we had the night Donald Link hosted a crawfish boil with his Cajun country cousin, Billy Link.
With the simplest technique and the freshest crawfish, these guys lit up an age-old Louisiana tradition. As I stood between the two of them at the newspaper-covered banquet table under the "Camp Fatback" competition tent, I learned that in the game of crawfish, the art of consumption is equal to that of the preparation. Thanks be to Billy and Donald for not only showing me the proper technique of how to eat crawfish, but for sharing some of theirs, as they each cracked ten to my one. "Pinch the tail, suck the head… repeat."

7. Whole Hog with the Fatback Collective

I'm one of those unique Southerners who didn't grow up basking in the pleasures of regional BBQ. As a native North Carolinian, this is nearly unheard of. As I came into cooking, I discovered BBQ as one of the many products of open-fire cooking, and ultimately, I came to respect it as our local great-great-grandfather of the art. As much as I could teach myself about BBQ just by picking up a vinegar-mopped smoked pork sandwich in any eastern North Carolina 'cue joint, it was with the professional pit masters of my pig cooking team the Fatback Collective (Sam Jones of Skylight Inn in North Carolina, Rodney Scott of Scott's BBQ in South Carolina, Drew Robinson of Jim and Nick's in Alabama, and Patrick Martin of Martin's in Tennessee) that I discovered the collaborative awesomeness of this region-specific craft.
As enthusiastically as we all stand behind our favorite style of BBQ (based on some palate preference and usually a lot of hometown allegiance), something beyond magical happens when the pit representatives of these communities come together and slow-cook a pig with the depth of tradition and the experience of multiple zip codes. The [benefit] of this gathering is perhaps the new voice of BBQ, and it's that of a choir, not of a soloist. As we all gather together around the fire, we put the pig over the coals for its long, slow roast and we honor it with a bourbon toast. As I return home and cook my own pigs, each time it's a little different, and somehow it still honors the place that I come from.

8. Roast chicken at Zuni Café (San Francisco, CA)

I think that roast chicken will tell you a lot about a kitchen. [It demonstrates commitment] to honor such a simple offering with proper brining, flavorful roasting, crisping of the skin, and patient resting of the protein. Proper roast chicken is so much more appealing to me than the most luxurious of ingredients. Not much compares when this dish is spot-on. Like many others, I experienced Judy Rodgers' roast chicken years ago at Zuni in San Francisco. It set the bar high for me as a young cook. Every time I'm basting a chicken with herbs and brown butter in a cast-iron pan, I can still taste that first bite from so many years ago.

9. In-season tomatoes and sea salt

I grew up on great homegrown tomatoes. I remember picking them as a kid, and the amazing grassy, fruity smell when you'd break them off of the vine (my hands itch a little just thinking about it). When they were in season, we ate them every day at almost every meal. They were on the table sliced and seasoned with salt and pepper with eggs at breakfast. We had them on sandwiches—usually completely dedicated to them—at lunch. For dinner, they were always sliced and seasoned, and served with mayonnaise.
Encountering such delicious in-season tomatoes at such a young age programmed me to utilize them as often as possible when they are in season. I crave them throughout the entire season, and I never get tired of them. Our menu reflects them in as many places as we can manage to get away with—in heirloom tomato salads with crusty garlic-rubbed croutons and milky burrata; minced into a relish with shallots and a vinaigrette of their own juices; and pressed into translucent, vibrant tomato water. Of the hundreds of things we do with tomatoes, my favorite preparation remains perfectly ripe tomato seasoned with sea salt. I think [the tomato's] ability to stand so strong with such little attention makes it a nearly perfect food.

10. Alex Raij's gazpacho at Txikito (New York, NY)

I love thinking about a dish one way and then discovering that there are expressions of this dish beyond what I've encountered. I've spent the majority of my life thinking that gazpacho was traditionally texture-heavy and often pulpy. I've also often found it too acidic and sometimes out of balance.
Alex Raij of Txikito in NYC taught me to make a brilliant version. In her version, all of the vegetables are brined, then pureed, and finally emulsified with delicious olive oil. The brine balances the seasoning, the pureeing makes all of the flavors sing together, and the emulsifying of olive oil into the puree adds richness and a silken texture. It's outstanding. This dish inspires quite a few items on our warm-weather menus—from velvety chilled tomato-cucumber soup with NC crabmeat and crème fraîche, to a tighter, brighter version that we use as a tomato vinaigrette. The possibilities are nearly limitless, as is the inspiration. For the original—when it's in season—visit Alex at Txikito in Chelsea or at her new Brooklyn post, La Vara.

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